2287: brief & mirth Mar 21, 2021

Not terribly alike in sound nor in meaning, 'brief' and 'merry' are not only related, except of course if brevity effects happiness. These two words are considered doublets, i.e. they diverged from the same word, but they are quite old and show many traces of historical divergences, such as how 'mirth' is how to express 'merry' as a noun, despite appearing fairly different. That said, the relation between [m] and [b] shouldn't stick out too much between 'mirth' and 'brief' since the former is just the nasalized form of the latter (just try saying [m] with a really blocked up nose) and [f] is a common way the TH becomes alters. Semantically however, these two words only eventually diverged after the original meaning of "short; small; or (counterintuitively) slow" when 'merry' began to describe the passage of enjoyable moments passing quickly, without care, and eventually described the emotion behind that. Initially as well 'merry' had the sense of 'fine' or 'pleasant' in a more general sense than it has today.